Case Number 13643

Avida

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All Rise...

Judge William Lee thinks the sweetest meat comes from the most dangerous game, but he needs to know it's not all black and white.

The Charge

"Whatever happens to animals will soon happen to man." —Chief Seattle (quoted in end credits)

Opening Statement

The writing-directing team of Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern
(Aaltra) return with another black and white comedy of surreal
proportions. Co-produced by Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine), Avida is the kind of
film David Lynch could have made early in his career if he was French and had a
sense for comedy.

Facts of the Case

Co-director Gustave Kervern plays a good-natured, deaf mute animal handler.
When his wealthy employer dies, the brawny but simple fellow gets mixed up with
a pair of zookeepers (Eric Martin and co-director Benoît Delépine) and
their kidnapping plot. The plan is to collect a ransom for the pet dog of a rich
(and extremely large) woman named Avida (Velvet D'Amour). But when the plan goes
wrong, the trio's only hope of getting their hands on the money is to help Avida
commit suicide.

The Evidence

There are moments in Avida that remind me of the long take, tableau
staging used by Jacques Tati (Playtime), but where he staged
seemingly routine everyday moments for light comic effect, Kervern and
Delépine stage the absurd and grotesque for decidedly darker laughs. Early
in the movie, there is a sequence where the mute's employer returns home and is
enjoying some music before his house burns down. The cinematography and sound
design work together wonderfully to set up the scene: access to the house is
securely controlled by remote, the house is soundproof, and the animal keeper is
playing with the guard dogs outside in the yard. As the room fills with smoke,
the music playing inside the room intensifies and all the while just beyond the
glass door is the deaf mute animal keeper completely oblivious to his boss's
unfortunate plight. As death scenes go, this one is hilariously ironic.

The movie's look is influenced by the works of Salvador Dali whose nickname
("Avida Dollars" is an anagram of the painter's name) is borrowed for
the movie's title. Landscapes with arrangements of animals and humans against
man-made objects make reference to the Surrealist's paintings. Death is a
prominent image throughout the movie. Between the suicide that opens the film
and the conclusion of Avida's death wish we also see: a zoo where visitors can
eat the animals they have just seen, the food stores of the zoo with boxes of
dead bite-size critters and a deranged taxidermist who makes up for his lack of
skill with artistic flair.

The black and white look is the appropriate choice for this dark comedy. The
grainy, high contrast picture lends a dreamlike feeling to the environments. The
monochrome visuals also give the close-ups of human flesh an artistic bias and
make the detailed shots of animal butchery considerably less gruesome. The DVD
packaging states that the video is "16x9 Enhanced" but it appeared
convincingly 1.33:1 full frame to me. The cinematography makes consistently good
use of the square frame in its compositions. The audio on this DVD is passable.
The mono soundtrack delivers the few lines of dialogue clearly and the rest of
the time the environmental sound effects and incidental music have a strong
presence.

Aside from the theatrical trailer, the other supplements of note are two
short music and dance videos featuring Velvet D'Amour. In "Game of
Life," we see plus-sized model in a routine with two male dancers. In
"Welcome to My Dream," she supplies the lyrics on the soundtrack while
shaking everything that can be shaken in front of the camera. Personal tastes
will determine how much of Ms. D'Amour you wish to see. I prefer her in the
black and white images of the main feature where she looks like a stray cast
member from a Fellini movie.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

This pair of filmmakers knows how to construct individual, absurd comic
moments that push the boundaries of comfortable viewing. However, their manner
of linking all those moments into a coherent story needs work. For example, the
kidnapping storyline is communicated so vaguely that it wasn't until the caper
went wrong that I really knew it was even happening. There are also some
interesting characters that pop in for scenes without really influencing the
plot. One very funny moment involved an inept bodyguard who just can't seem to
get comfortable firing his gun so he continues shooting well past the point of
it doing any good. That's not the only character that left me hoping to see them
in another scene. I am willing to accept that in this surreal universe there are
things that will be left unexplained—like the siren that prompts every
person in town to play dead—but with such a richness of imaginative
weirdness on display, the last act of the story shouldn't need to drag the way
it does. That wild energy exhibited in the first half of the movie should have
been more evenly spread about.

Closing Statement

Avida is weirdly fun entertainment full of dark humor and atmospheric
visuals that are, at times, a bit unnerving and grotesque but not gross.